Torrington, Jeff

(British, 1935– )

Torrington published his first novel, Swing Hammer Swing, in 1992 having worked on it for thirty years. It is an inventive, comic account of a few days in the life of Tam Clay, an unemployed Glaswegian with novelistic aspirations, during the early 1960s just as the Gorbals slums are being demolished. The Devil's Carousel (1996), Torrington's second novel, also unites linguistic and dialect playfulness with working-class concerns: it is about union action in a Glasgow car factory, structured as a series of character sketches.

James Kelman, James Joyce  SV